Seldom had there been such a hubbub in Normandy as this assembly presented. Some, whom there is but little doubt had previously made their arrangements with either the duke or his officials, were ready to give ships, money, or anything they possessed; others, who had come to no understanding as to what return was to be made, would give nothing, but said that they were already burthened with more debts than they could pay. In the midst of this confusion, when fifty were talking like one, and they could scarcely hear each other speak for their own clamour, William Fitz-Osbern, the seneschal, or ducal lieutenant of Normandy, entered the hall, and raising his voice high above the rest, he exclaimed, "Why dispute ye thus? He is your lord—he has need of you; it were better your duty to make your offers, and not to await his request. If you fail him now, and he gain his end, he will remember it; prove, then, that you love him, and act accordingly." "Doubtless," cried the opponents, "he is our lord; but is it not enough for us to pay him his dues? We owe him no aid beyond the seas; he has already enough oppressed us with his wars; let him fail in his new enterprise, and our country is undone."[20]
It was at last resolved that Fitz-Osbern should lead the way, and make the best terms he could with the duke. He did; and they followed him probably not further than the next apartment, where William was awaiting their decision; and great must have been their astonishment when the seneschal commenced his oration. In vain did they shrug up their shoulders, lift up their eyes, and exclaim, "No, no! we did not say this; we will not do that." Onward plunged Fitz-Osbern deeper and deeper, declaring that they were the most loyal and zealous people in the world—that they were ready to serve him here, there, and everywhere,—that they would give him all they possessed; and, more than that, that those who had supplied him with two mounted soldiers would now furnish four. In vain they roared out, "No, no! we will serve him in his own country, but nowhere beside." Fitz-Osbern had in his imagination jerked them across the ocean, and furnished William with an army in no time; and when he had finished, he left them to settle as they best could with the duke,—for there is no doubt the matter had been previously concocted between the seneschal and William.
The duke of Normandy either was, or pretended to be surprised and enraged beyond measure. Could his seneschal have deceived him, or could they be so disloyal as to refuse to furnish him with the aid he required? Such a matter must be looked into—and it was. He sent separately for the most influential of the leaders; had a private conference with each; and, when they came out, they were ready to grant him everything. He gave them sealed letters for security; and what they contained we may readily guess—for the man who consented to portion out England to his followers before they had conquered it, was not likely to stick at giving away all Europe [on parchment] to secure his ends. By such tricks as these, sorry are we to write it, he obtained the aid of many brave and honourable men. But for this, we might have ranked his invasion with an army of unprincipled adventurers, amongst the ravages of those Goths and Vandals who in the darker ages overran Greece and Rome. "He published his proclamation," says Thierry, "in the neighbouring countries, and offered good pay and the pillage of England to every man who would serve him with lance, sword, or cross-bow; and multitudes accepted the invitation, coming by every road, far and near, from north and south. All the professional adventurers, all the military vagabonds of western Europe, hastened to Normandy by long marches; some were knights and chiefs of war, the others simple foot-soldiers and serjeants-of-arms, as they were then called. Some demanded money-pay, others only their passage, and all the booty they might make. Some asked for land in England, a domain, a castle, a town; others simply required some rich Saxon in marriage. Every thought, every desire of human avarice presented itself; "William rejected no one," says the Norman chronicle, "and satisfied every one as well as he could."
From spring to autumn, Normandy was the great rallying point for every one who had strength enough to wield arms, and were willing to dash out the brain of his fellow-men. The three-lion banner threw its folds over more crime and cruelty than was, perhaps, ever found amongst the same number of men; and the doors of this huge inhuman stye were about to be opened, and the grim, savage, and tusked herd turned loose, to slay, root-up, overrun, and desecrate a country to which Alfred the Great had given laws—a kingdom that already stood second to none in the wide world for civilization. These man-slayers ran together to hunt in couples—they became sworn brothers in arms—they vowed to share all they gained—they made these promises in churches—they knelt hand in hand before the holy altars, and blasphemously called God to witness that they would equally divide what they obtained by bloodshed and robbery. Prayers were said, and psalms chaunted, and tapers burnt in churches for the success of these armed marauders; yet neither the thunder nor the lightning nor an avenging arm descended to strike dead the impious priests who thus dared to invoke His sacred name in so unholy a cause; and for ages after, many a golden cross and sacred vessel of gold or silver, which had once decorated the altars of the English monasteries, were seen in the mis-called sacred buildings of Normandy—rewards which were given by the Norman Bastard to these mitred blasphemers. Some were honourable enough to refuse to co-operate with the Norman on any terms, like the high-minded Gilbert Fitz-Richard, who came over with the duke because he was his liege lord; and when the period of his servitude had expired, returned again to his own country, no richer than when he came. But there were few, we fear, like him. Thierry says, "He was the only one among the knights who accompanied the Norman that claimed neither lands nor gold." Many, we know, while the army was encamped near the river Dive, did homage for the lands which were then in the peaceable possession of the Saxons, who little dreamed, while they were superintending the gathering in of their harvest, that the Norman Bastard was already portioning out their fair domains amongst men who had sworn to do his "bloody business."
When William applied to Philip of France for his assistance—and in the most humiliating terms offered to do homage for England, and to hold it as the vassal of France—Philip refused to assist him. With the count of Flanders, his brother-in-law, he fared no better; and when Conan, king of Brittany, heard that duke William, whom he looked upon as an usurper, and the murderer of his father, was preparing for the invasion of England, he sent him the following message by one of his chamberlains:—"I hear that thou art about to cross the sea, to conquer the kingdom of England. Now, duke Robert, whose son thou pretendest to be, on departing for Jerusalem, remitted all his heritage to count Allan, my father, who was his cousin; but thou and thy accomplices poisoned my father. Thou hast appropriated to thyself his seigneury, and hast detained it to this day, contrary to all justice, seeing that thou art a bastard. Restore me, then, the duchy of Normandy, which belongs to me, or I will make war upon thee to the last extremity with all the forces at my disposal."
The Norman historians state that William was somewhat alarmed at this message, as such an attack must have prevented his meditated invasion; but the king of Brittany did not survive his threat many days. The Norman succeeded in bribing the chamberlain to murder his royal master, and this he accomplished by rubbing the mouth-piece of his hunting horn with deadly poison, so that when Conan next rode to the chase, he blew his last blast. Many of William's enemies were at this time, beyond doubt, removed by similar means. Nor do such deeds startle the historian as he draws nearer to that land of horrors; to the threshold of that country which, by his command, was stained with the blood of a hundred thousand murders. The successor of Conan, warned by the fate of father and son, patched up a peace with the Norman, and allowed many of his subjects to accompany the expedition.
When all was in readiness for this long threatened invasion, a contrary wind set in, and kept the large fleet, which amounted to many hundred sail, for nearly a whole month at the mouth of the Dive, a river which falls into the sea between the Seine and the Orne. After this a southerly breeze sprang up, and wafted the mighty armament as far as the roadsteads of St. Valery, near Dieppe; then the wind suddenly changed, and there they were compelled to lie at anchor for several days. Many of the vessels were wrecked; and lest an alarm should spread amongst his troops, William caused the bodies of the drowned men to be buried with speed, and in privacy. Nor did such disasters fail in producing their effects upon his superstitious followers. Some deserted his standard, for they thought that an expedition, which the very elements seemed to oppose, could only be attended with evil. Murmurs broke out in the fleet—the soldiers began to converse with each other, and to exaggerate the number of dead bodies which had been buried in the sand—to conjure up perils and difficulties which they had never before seen. "The man is mad," said they, "who seeks to seize the land of another. God is offended with such designs, and proves it by refusing us a favourable wind." In vain did William increase the rations of provisions, and supply them with larger portions of strong liquor—the same low feeling of despondency reigned along the shore and in the ships. The soldiers were weary of watching the monotonous waves that ever rolled from the same quarter—they were tired of feeling the wind blow upon their faces from the same direction—but there was no help—no change; the breeze shifted not; and they paced wearily! wearily! along the shore; reckoning up again the number of dead bodies which had already been buried in the sand, then shaking their heads, and muttering to each other, "So many have perished, and yet we are no nearer the battle than when we set out." Others deserted on the morrow.
In vain did duke William attend the church of St. Valery daily, and pray before the shrine of the saint—the little weathercock on the bell-tower still pointed in the same direction day after day—his prayers were of no avail; and sometimes he came out of the church with such an expression on his countenance, as led the beholder to conclude that, from the bottom of his heart, he wished the wind, the weathercock, and the saint, with that dusky gentleman after whom the Normans had nicknamed his father. Weary and disheartened, like his followers, at this long delay, William at last hit upon a device, that at least served to arouse the spirits of his soldiers from the state of despondency into which they had sunk, and to chase from their minds the gloomy doubts and forebodings with which they had been so long overcast. To accomplish this, he took from the church of St. Valery the coffer that contained the relics of the patron saint, and this he had carried with great ceremony through the camp in the centre—it was at last set down; and prayers having been offered up for a favourable wind, the soldiers in procession passed by the relics of the reputed saint, each throwing upon it what he could best afford, until the "shrine was half buried in the heaps of gold, silver, and precious things, which were showered upon it. Thus artfully did he, instead of interposing the authority of a sovereign and a military leader, to punish the language of sedition and mutiny among his troops, oppose superstition to superstition, to amuse the short-sighted instruments of his ambition."[21]
On the following night the wind chanced to change, to the great delight of the priests who attended the camp, and who, while they packed up the rich offerings which had been thrown over the dry and marrowless bones of a good and pious old man, failed not to attribute the natural change in the current of the atmosphere to the intercession of St. Valery. At daybreak, on the twenty-seventh of September, the sky was bright and beautiful—the wind blowing in a favourable direction from the south, and the sun, which had for many days been enveloped in mists and clouds, now rose with a summer-like splendour, throwing long trails of golden light over the green and ridgy sea. The camp was immediately broken up, the sails were hoisted, and in a few hours the large fleet, which contained upwards of sixty thousand men, launched forth into the open sea amid the deep braying of the Norman trumpets. Foremost in the van rode the beautiful vessel which contained William, duke of Normandy. At its mast-head fluttered the consecrated banner which had been sent by the pope, and below this streamed out another flag, marked with the cross of Calvary, for so was the emblem of our salvation profaned. The sails were of various colours, and on them were emblazoned in gold the three lions, the haughty arms of Normandy. The prow of the vessel was decorated with the figure of a child, bearing a bent bow in its hand, as if in the act of discharging an arrow. When night closed in over the sea, a large lantern was hoisted to the mast-head of this magnificent vessel, and through the hours of darkness that vast fleet marched from wave to wave, every billow rolling it nearer to the shores of England. When the grey morning again dawned upon the sea, the Norman chief, finding that he had far outsailed his fleet, sent one of his sailors up the mast to see if he could descry the lagging ships in the distance. At first, the man who was despatched to look out saw nothing but sea and sky; but on his third ascent, he exclaimed, "I see a forest of masts and sails!" William then either dropped his anchor, or took in his canvas, until the foremost vessels approached, and in a few hours after, the vast armament was riding safely in Pevensey Bay; only one or two vessels having been lost, while crossing the English channel, and in one of these was a famous astrologer who had predicted that the voyage would terminate without a disaster; but when William heard of his death, he shrewdly remarked, "that he who could not foresee his own fate, was ill adapted to foretel the fate of others."
It appears that the Saxon vessels which had so long been cruising upon the coast of Sussex, awaiting the arrival of the Normans, had returned to port from want of provisions. Thus William was enabled to land his troops without opposition; and on the 28th of September, his forces disembarked at Pevensey, on the coast of Sussex. The archers, who wore short coats, and had their hair cut close, were the first to land. They were followed by the knights, who wore corslets of burnished mail, and conical shaped helmets of glittering steel; each bore in his hand a strong lance, while at his side hung a long, straight, double-edged sword. Then came the pioneers, the carpenters, and the smiths, each wheeling up and forming themselves into separate divisions, until the whole shore was covered with armed men and horses, above whose heads fluttered the gonfannons and the larger banners, which were so soon to serve as beacons in the rallying points of battle. William was the last to land, and his foot had scarcely touched the sandy shore before he stumbled and fell. A murmur arose amid the assembled host, and voices were heard to exclaim, "This is an evil sign." But the duke, with that ready talent which enabled him to give a favourable appearance to serious as well as trifling disasters, suddenly sprang up, and showing the sand which he had grasped in his fall, exclaimed, "Lords, what is it you say? What, are you amazed? I have taken seizin of this land with my hands, and, by the splendour of God, all that it contains is ours." One of the soldiers then ran hastily forward, and tearing a handful of thatch from the roof of a neighbouring cottage, an ancient mode of conveyance, which still exists, he presented it to the duke, saying, "Sire, I give you seizin, in token that the realm is yours." William answered, "I accept it, and may God be with us." Refreshments were then distributed to the soldiers as they rested upon the beach.